The Iranian version copied the original word-for-word, even including a made-up quote from a fictional West Virginia resident who says he’d rather go to a baseball game with Ahmadinejad because “he takes national defense seriously, and he’d never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does.”

Homosexual acts are punishable by death in Iran, and Ahmadinejad famously said during a 2007 appearance at Columbia University that “in Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”

The Iranian version of the article leaves out only The Onion’s description of Ahmadinejad as “a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed.”

[…]

Onion editor Will Tracy put out a tongue-in-cheek statement that referred to Fars as “a subsidiary of The Onion” that has acted as the paper’s Middle Eastern bureau since it was founded in the mid-1980s by Onion publisher T.

Sometimes, major media is the last to recognize, shifts in policy positions. Iran is a case in point.

In the lead up to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s annual speech to the General Assembly, the American TV stations were preparing their audiences for another provocative Israel-hating rant.

Brace yourself, we were told; it is his last appearance in office so he would go off and all out in denouncing Israel and world’s Jews.

Secretary General Moon cautioned him publicly to restrain his rhetoric even as right wing media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, that has never seen a far right wing Zionist cause it hasn’t embraced, went into full deionization mode with a front cover featuring his picture and the words, “Peace of Sh*t.” (It was reminiscent of the Saddam baiting in US media in the run-up to the Iraq War.)

The rhetoric of the well orchestrated anti-Iranian crowds outside was even bloodier than the Iranians had ever been with former Republican speaker of the House and GOP presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich calling for immediate U.S.… Read the rest

Somehow I doubt that the "New World Order" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has in mind is quite the same as the one that certain conspiracy theorists fret loudly about (you know who they are...). In this interview by Associated Press he says,

"God willing, a new order will come and will do away with ... everything that distances us ... Now even elementary school kids throughout the world have understood that the United States government is following an international policy of bullying. I do believe the system of empires has reached the end of the road. The world can no longer see an emperor commanding it."

Tehran, Iran: Iran seems to many to be next in line for the Iraqi freedom treatment, the latest in a long line of “enemy” nations menaced by overt and covert military threats by the United States and its allies.

Tehran. Photo: Maryam Ashoori (CC)

As the psyops operations and media propaganda intensifies, you might think war is imminent for defense and that Iran is doing what countries under threat do in these circumstances—such as mobilizing their people and preparing for a bombing onslaught.

Think again. While I have been told that military targets have been or are being moved around, the atmosphere in Tehran is relaxed with more talk of a cultural battlefield than a military one. There’s a commemoration under way of the 33rd anniversary of the Iranian revolution and an international conference on “Hollywoodism and Cinema” as an extension of an annual Fajr film festival.

And that’s what I am doing here, as a guest participant in an event that sees Hollywood as a bigger enemy than the Pentagon.… Read the rest

It’s true: if you want peace, you must prepare for war; however, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it–so I guess war with Iran is inevitable. Tom Engelhardt writes at Alternet:

These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered. Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:

Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country’s oil industry. In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police. He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington’s “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf — until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs.

TEHRAN — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday accused Western countries of devising plans to "cause drought" in the Islamic republic, as he inaugurated a dam in a central province.
"Western countries have designed plans to cause drought in certain areas of the world, including Iran," the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying in the central city of Arak in Markazi province.
"According to reports on climate, whose accuracy has been verified, European countries are using special equipment to force clouds to dump" their water on their continent, he said.
By doing so, "they prevent rain clouds from reaching regional countries, including Iran," Ahmadinejad charged. Iran has experienced several droughts in recent years.

Al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden was a prisoner in US custody for “sometime” before he was killed by the American military, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said.

“I have exact information that bin Laden was held by the American military for sometime… until the day they killed him he was a prisoner held by them,” the hardline president said in a live interview on Iranian state television.

“Please pay attention. This is important. He was held by them for sometime. They made him sick and while he was sick they killed him,” Ahmadinejad added.

He accused US President Barack Obama for announcing the al-Qaida leader’s death for “political gain.”

“What the US president has done is for domestic political gain. In other words, they killed him for Mr Obama’s election and now they are seeking to replace him with someone else,” Ahmadinejad said without elaborating.

Bin Laden was shot dead on May 2 in a US commando raid on a heavily fortified compound near Islamabad, Pakistan.